The following relates to the medical monitoring arts. It finds particular application in bedside patient monitoring in clinical settings such as hospitals, intensive care units (ICU), cardiac care units (CCU), and so forth, and will be described with particular reference thereto. However, it also finds more general application in medical monitoring generally, including fetal monitoring, neonatal monitoring, pediatric monitoring, surgical patient monitoring, outpatient monitoring, home monitoring, veterinary monitoring, monitoring during aerobic workouts, and so forth.
Medical monitoring systems provide extensive information about the patient. In some systems, rack-mounted modular monitoring units can be selectively assembled to monitor selected medical parameters such as temperature, electrocardiographic (ECG) data, heart rate, oxygen saturation (SpO2), breathing rate, blood pressure parameters, and so forth. The mounted modular monitoring units feed data into a monitoring system that plots or trends selected data, stores data for later review, or so forth.
Each monitored parameter typically includes a connection with the patient. For example, ECG monitoring includes four or more electrical contacts to the patient's skin, typically in the torso region near the heart. In some cases, a single connection to the patient may provide more than one monitored signal. For example, a single finger-clip monitor may provide both heart rate and SpO2 data. To reduce the number of patient connections, some medical monitoring systems include derived parameters. For example, various blood pressure parameters such as arterial blood pressure, central venous pressure, and so forth, can be derived from a continuous blood pressure monitor. This facilitates increasing the number of monitored parameters without concomitant increase in the number of modular monitoring units and without concomitant increase in the number of patient probes.
The monitoring system typically also provides event monitoring, in which an alarm is sounded if and when a parameter exceeds a threshold. For example, an alarm may sound if and when the heart rate decreases below a lower threshold value, or exceeds an upper threshold value. Similarly, an alarm may sound if the oxygen saturation drops below a threshold such as 90%. Such event monitoring advantageously provides an efficient and immediate way to alert medical personnel to potentially life-threatening patient conditions.
Existing monitoring systems provide monitoring flexibility through the use of modular monitoring units and derived parameters. However, medical personnel are limited to those monitoring units and derived parameters provided by the monitoring system. Medical personnel often perform calculations and estimations using existing monitoring data to provide desired additional information.
Shaya et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,447,164, discloses a medical monitoring system in which the user can set up user-defined events for alarming. This can enable medical personnel to better configure the medical monitoring system to alarm upon occurrence of potentially life-threatening patient conditions. For example, rather than alarming exclusively by thresholding the heart rate, an alarm can be triggered based on a user-selectable combination of heart rate and blood pressure thresholds. However, this approach does not provide medical personnel with additional information except upon occurrence of the selected alarm threshold.